Secco Recit

A friend recently posed to me the hypothetical (and I'm just now realizing probably rhetorical) question, "Where would we be if Howard Ashman were still alive?" And my immediate response was "Well, Wicked probably wouldn't exist, or at least not in the form it does today." Which led me down a rabbit hole of counterfactualizing an elaborate timeline in which Howard Ashman did not die in 1991, and continued to change the landscape of Disney and musical theater in a radical way. (NOTE: This is all for fun and intended to be rather tongue-in-cheek. I do not have the ability to accurately predict this or any other alternate futures. If I did, I would become a time-traveling theatrical producer.) Howard Ashman and frequent collaborator Alan Menken You see, Howard Ashman's role in the shaping of a generation of childhoods began in 1987/88, when he was brought in to write lyrics for Disney's new animated feature, Oliver And Company . While worki...

Encores! Off-Center at City Center just finished its run of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's God Bless You Mr. Rosewater , based on the Kurt Vonnegut novel of the same name. I saw the show yesterday, and was duly impressed. I very much like Encores! (Although I'm not a fan of the exclamation mark at the end; I have no idea how to punctuate it, for instance, in a list, such as I might be listing Encores!, Oliver!, Oklahoma!, and other such annoying titles that end in exclamation marks.) The premise of the series is to perform obscure musicals, and try to bring them back into the public eye. Sometimes this works well, most notably with their 1996 production of Chicago. Then an obscure faded show, Encores! revived it, and what was originally a limited-run concert launched a full-scale Broadway revival which is still running twenty years later. Some of the shows Encores! performs were originally poorly received (or later dipped into obscurity) because they were somehow unconvent...